e traitor Rowland Yorke first introduced thrusting
with rapiers, sword and buckler are disused.' In The Two Angry Women
of Abingdon, a comedy, printed in 1599, we have a pathetic complaint:
'Sword and buckler fight begins to grow out of use. I am sorry for it;
I shall never see good manhood again. If it be once gone, this poking
fight of rapier and dagger will come up; then a tall man and a good
sword and buckler man will be spitted like a cat or rabbit.' But the
rapier had upon the Continent long superseded, in private duel, the use
of sword and shield. The masters of the noble science of defence were
chiefly Italians. They made great mystery of their art and mode of
instruction, never suffered any person to be present but the scholar who
was to be taught, and even examined closets, beds, and other places
of possible concealment. Their lessons often gave the most treacherous
advantages; for the challenged, having the right to choose his weapons,
frequently selected some strange, unusual, and inconvenient kind of
arms, the use of which he practised under these instructors, and thus
killed at his ease his antagonist, to whom it was presented for the
first time on the field of battle. See Brantome's Discourse on Duels,
and the work on the same subject, 'si gentement ecrit,' by the venerable
Dr. Paris de Puteo. The Highlanders continued to use broadsword and
target until disarmed after the affair of 1745-6."

385. Ward. Posture of defence; a technical term in fencing. Cf.
Falstaff's "Thou knowest my old ward" (1 Hen. IV. ii. 4. 215), etc.

387. While less expert, etc. The MS. reads:

"Not Roderick thus, though stronger far,
More tall, and more inured to war."

401, 402. And backward, etc. This couplet is not in the MS.; and the
same is true of 405, 406.

406. Let recreant yield, etc. The MS. has "Yield they alone who fear to
die." Scott says: "I have not ventured to render this duel so savagely
desperate as that of the celebrated Sir Ewan of Lochiel, chief of the
clan Cameron, called, from his sable complexion, Ewan Dhu. He was the
last man in Scotland who maintained the royal cause during the great
Civil War, and his constant incursions rendered him a very unpleasant
neighbor to the republican garrison at Inverlochy, now Fort William. The
governor of the fort detached a party of three hundred men to lay
waste Lochiel's possessions and cut down his trees; by in a sudden and
desperate attack made upon